Tag: career

Well, if there’s anything I can say I learned last week week (in addition to chiropractors are dangerous), it’s this:

How very, very grateful I am not to have a permanent nerve injury.

I guess that’s sort of the obvious thing for anyone to say in this situation. But what really surprised me was that my biggest fear was not how difficult daily life was going to be if my nerve issues turned out to be permanent.

Instead, what scared me the most was that I might have to give up my chosen career– or, at least, not be able to do it in the way that I want.

It was sort of a reminder for me, in a way, of how much I really want to become a physical therapist. Because in my daily life, I often get bogged down in the practicalities. The few remaining prerequisites I would need to take in order to apply to certain programs. Taking the GRE (again, that is– let’s not talk about how I scored the first time!).

Last Friday, I consulted a neurologist, and was very encouraged by what she said. On the way home, I stopped in the town of Newburyport, Mass., which is always one of my favorite places to go in the summer.

I could feel my body telling me it was okay to move, that it was okay to start using my legs again. So I walked around and took in the sunset, gathering my thoughts.

And I was just sort of thinking of everything I’ve been working on so far– my classes, my blog, my Youtube channel (I have so many ideas for videos I mean to make!).

And of course, the e-book I’ve been working on– Exercises for the Sacroiliac Joint. It will be quite a bit easier to get back into concentrating on that, now that the question of whether I’ll be partially paralyzed for the rest of my life has been taken off the table.

As I have said before, I don’t necessarily think everything happens for a reason. But as my friend Nicole told me once, “You can make meaning out of things for yourself.”

So there a few lessons I can draw from what happened:

1) I need to explore alternatives to chiropractic adjustments. Who knows where this will take me? Maybe I’ll discover something even better, something that will benefit my future patients and make me a better PT.

2) I have such a better understanding now of what it feels like to have nerve damage. Before, it was something I only could imagine. Now I have felt it– thankfully, only for about a week.

And 3) What a reminder of how much I really do want to do this. I want to teach people, I want to educate (and thank God I’ll still be able to use my own body as a tool to do so with).

Sometimes I feel myself get slowed down by the demands of daily life, and the things I have to do just to get into school. So in a way, it was quite the wake-up call to get in touch with the fear I had, at the thought it could be taken away.

It occurred to me recently that I really haven’t talked much about my progress towards becoming a physical therapist on this blog.

So, if you’re curious, here’s my deal:

I have a Bachelor’s degree in the humanities. My concentration was social theory, with an emphasis on gender studies.

My goals, when I was in college, were focused in a pretty different direction than the path I’m on now: I wanted to study social policy, and travel abroad working for various non-profits and human rights agencies. I also wanted to become a psychotherapist.

I started down that road immediately out of college, working at a mental health agency so that I could gain experience before grad school.

Before this, I’d already had a lot of struggles with chronic pain, and had to have surgery for compartment syndrome. Yet after college, I’d managed to reach some kind of holding pattern where pain didn’t cause me to miss work. That was, until the awful winter of 2010, when a few things happened in a brief span of time that caused my pain levels to flare way up.

That was my breaking point– when I tried, anew, to get answers. Finally, after months of searching, I found my physical therapist Tim, who had studied pain neurophysiology education with Neil Pearson.

***

Ultimately, I was so inspired by everything I learned from Tim that it led me to consider becoming a physical therapist.

I’d always found physical therapy to be a fascinating field. As a high school runner, I’d had a few serious injuries where I really needed PT to get up and moving again. I had formed some great relationships with my therapists, and hung on every word they said. A part of me was always a little bit sad when they told me I was doing well enough that I didn’t need to come back. I would have gladly come back back every day, just to hang out and learn.

When I was a freshman in high school, I partially tore my hip flexor during a cross-country race and was on crutches for months. It was a physical therapist who helped me overcome my fear and eventually start running again.

Then, when I was 19 and had surgery for compartment syndrome, it was a physical therapist who got me back up and moving again. While I’ll always be grateful to the surgeon who fixed my legs, my PT was the one who gave me the confidence to actually start using them again.

And now, when my life had ground to a complete halt at age 25 because of constant, debilitating pain, it was a physical therapist who gave me my life back again.

I’d always had so much appreciation for PT’s. Now, the idea dawned on me: why don’t I try to become one?

***

Growing up, I didn’t really consider myself that much of a science person. Looking back, I think a lot of that has to do with the environment at my school, and how our science classes were taught.

Once I started looking into becoming a PT– taking classes, shadowing practicing PT’s– I realized I always had been interested in health science, and exercise physiology, and human anatomy. It had just taken a different form.

I’d always wanted to do the best thing for my body. I loved when my running coaches talked about strengthening, building endurance, the benefits of stretching.

And I’d always been interested in nutrition, and being healthy overall.

It’s just that when I was younger, I didn’t have the healthiest mindset, and took some of these interests too far. But my eating disorder was not all of me– it was a snapshot of a specific place I was in, at a certain point in time, at a certain age. Although I had some distorted beliefs, that does not mean I wasn’t also genuinely interested in health and fitness at the same time.

The difference is that now, I am able to come at it in a much healthier, stable, and more grounded manner, and know that I will be able to help others with similar struggles.

***

Five years later, I can say that I ended up loving all of my prerequisite classes, and I’m so glad I made the decision to take them.

It’s been an incredibly long road. You see, some of the classes I needed to take had prerequisites of their own. At the same time, due to my SI joint issues, there were periods of time where I found it incredibly difficult to walk, drive, or even stand up for more than a few minutes.

Despite of all of this, I’m finally at the point now where I’ve basically taken all of the classes I need in order to apply to PT school. (I might need to take one or two more, depending on specific programs I might try to get into, but most of my bases are covered).

And honestly, I’m so glad I made this decision. I realized that, while the humanities will always be my first love, I am also a science person, and have been all along. I couldn’t see it at the time, but I know it now.

I haven’t been able to write as much as I’d like recently, because I’ve been busy focusing on my real-world exploits: specifically, earning money for grad school.

It’s hard to find the right balance. Follow your dreams and the money will come, they say. But when your dreams involve $70,000 in student loans, and three years with no income… blazing ahead with no thought of the financial risk is a little easier said than done.

For now, I just have to remind myself to slow down, and check in with the part of myself that knows exactly what my dreams are. The part that, despite whatever else is going on in my life, never truly loses sight of what I want to do.

After all, a lesson I’m learning is that it’s not just what you do as you go about your daily life– it’s also how you go about it.

But I’m realizing that was not a sustainable way to live. When you try to numb yourself to pain and doubt, and rush through life distracted trying not to feel anything… you also miss out on the good.

There is a certain pain that comes from trying to suppress your dreams. If you block it out for long enough, it will grow until you can’t ignore it anymore.

My goal right now is to remain focused on what I need to do in order to achieve my goal, without letting myself get so mired in the details that I lose sight of my original purpose.

***

I’ve written a lot about helping people through chronic pain, and that’s a huge part of what I want to do as a PT. But ultimately, it’s about something bigger.

Really, it’s about providing a space for people to begin, wherever they are. To create a space where there is no judgment; where I believe my patients when they tell me how bad it really is, without giving them any reason to feel ashamed, or to censor themselves.

And then, using that as our starting place, we’ll work together to find answers. I know how hopeless things can seem at times, because I’ve been there myself.

Sometimes it can take years to find the right answer– or answers. Sometimes you don’t discover everything you need at once– you discover what you need in stages.

***

I want to create a space for people to be in touch with their bodies, in whatever way works for them. To show my patients that you don’t have to wait until you are completely “better,” by some objective measure, to begin to create a sense of peace in your body.

You can actually begin the process right away– before you do anything else, before you’ve spent weeks in PT exercising. It can actually be the very first thing you begin to work on. Sometimes, you just need to have the right person to show you the way.

I know, because I’ve been lucky enough to find those right people in my own life. And I hope, someday, to give back what I’ve learned, and be that person for others.

I’ve come so far since the days when I was a terrified teenager with compartment syndrome and an eating disorder. I may not have gone back to running 40 miles a week, but on the inside, I am millions of miles away from where I was.

There is so much that has gone into changing my perspective, and I hope to share it all with you. I hope you’ll come along for the ride.

Since I started my blog, my policy was generally only to write if things were going well– or at least, to only highlight the positive.

The Internet is tricky. We’re all still figuring out– and as we figure it out, it’s constantly changing.

I’m honestly torn about what exactly I want this blog to be. Do I want it to be professional– kind of like my calling card, to start building connections in the field I hope to go into?

Or do I simply want to be what I’ve always “wanted to be” ever since I read the Little House on the Prairie series as a child– a writer?

I’m torn.

Do I want to create a “reputation” as someone knowledgeable about the body– a future healthcare professional? Or do I want to tell my story, in the hopes it will help someone else out there know she isn’t alone?

It’s awkward. Actually, it’s beyond awkward.

I’ve worked in the helping professions– mental health, specifically. And there, rule #1 is never to talk about yourself– at least, never to offer up anything you wouldn’t mind having attacked later on.

And I’ve seen it– how a person can turn on you, take something you only said in an attempt to be helpful, and try to turn it into something else, twisting your words into something ugly and unrecognizable. Even sinister.

Working in mental health changed me, that’s for sure.

But even without that experience, I think we are all coming to the realization that the Internet is a place that never forgets, where mistakes are never forgiven. In this day and age of screen-shots and screen-caps and whatever else, saying something on the Internet basically means you are saying it forever.

I mean, really. Can I pour my heart out here, admitting my mistakes and defeats… and also expect people to take me seriously as their physical therapist someday?

Honestly, I don’t know.

But I have always wanted to be a writer. To put my stories into the perfect words, to hold them up to the light and examine them, to extract all the meaning from them that I can, and then to share them– that’s always been something I’ve longed to do.

So I guess I’m going to keep trying. To step out on a limb, a little bit. To test the waters.

To see what will happen if I worry less about being “professional” on here (which, frankly, has resulted in me not writing very much at all) and see what happens if I instead focus on being authentic.